


BLACK FLIES

by sea333



Category: No Fandom, Original Work
Genre: Dystopia, M/M, Near Future, Post-Apocalypse, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-23
Updated: 2020-03-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:53:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 9,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22854277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sea333/pseuds/sea333
Summary: They had the world to themselves.
Relationships: Original Male Character/Original Male Character
Comments: 1
Kudos: 9





	1. day one. ambrosio. mortality.

Winter brought an unprecedented haze low over a ragged ocean. The horizon advanced on us until the visibility dropped to about fifty yards. A stranger to the island could run along the beach and never find himself again. 

The wind, too, is horrendous. This morning I found myself standing on the deck thumbing at a lighter ( _you need to do a better job at conserving those_ , Matthew always said) trying for a cigarette in the other hand (Matthew did not comment on this) and found my tangled hair flung forward in a black wave by a sudden gust and almost catching. I guess being one of two remaining humans on an island that used to house thousands doesn’t preclude setting your own hair on fire. 

I walked the old Strand this morning and found another. To be honest, I was surprised; I thought we’d found them all. Small, but not frail; an old eighteen or a young twenty; very pale, like Matthew; eyes still open, nearly black like mine. 

The body lay in the middle in the broad and cobbled street, between a couple of parked cars that would never move again; the strand was quiet around us, the old Victorian or neo-Victorian facades watched us through the fog with disinterest. When we found the bodies regularly—shortly after the bridges had been blown and the only way back to mainland was by boat—there were more people to aid in the disposal, and we would spend hours out of each day cleaning up.

The worst part of the initial disposal was when someone would be in the midst of pouring gasoline—or whiskey, if they were thinking about preserving gasoline, though I think most preferred to save the Jack at that point—over a body and the pourer would drop the bottle and then—four or five seconds later—drop dead. Heart stopped, just like that. The most efficient engineered plague the world has ever seen, according to Matthew, at least. 

I patted my pockets, looking for gloves and not expecting to find any. But I did. They were the blue surgical gloves that we had boxes and boxes of, courtesy of Matthew’s old university job. Thank the gods of biology that I didn’t end up with a geologist.

I take the cadaver gently under the arms and load it into the makeshift PVC trailer behind the little dull black motorcycle that Matthew and I share. There were plenty of vehicles to commandeer, but it tends to be more efficient to siphon fuel for one, to keep it running. Besides, Matthew has a personal connection to the vehicle. Once upon a time, it was his hobby, just as I would go out every morning to surf, watching the sun rise as the ocean batted against my legs. Once upon a time, the island was very bike-friendly, and it wasn’t uncommon to see a pack of ten roaring between the palms on a sunny summer day, half the riders shirtless or in those loud pastel hibiscus shirts. 

Today, it was silent as I cut the engine on the bike and scavenged the old candy store for some surviving taffee. Still wrapped, of course. The risk of eating uncovered foods was too high. Once upon a time, flies were harmless nuisances. 

Cargo safely loaded, I revved the bike’s engine, shocking around the old gutted corpse of a downtown like a gunshot. The palms swayed in the wind, their greens mellowed out by the blue hue that the fog applies to varnish to everything it touches. Riding a motorcycle in shorts was not my best idea, but even the winters here warm enough to do so. It isn’t solely that, though—a turquoise palm tree-patterned tanktop and ruddy denim shorts seem incongruous to this atmosphere, but the end doesn’t always come bearing sweaters and long pants. 

The Strand receded behind me, giving rise to more multicolored Victorian facades that dwindled as the road’s elevation dropped below sea level. I hear gulls and waves, but the visibility is too low to catch glimpses of the ocean between the stilts of those houses that are closer to shore. At this point, we could have our pick of any house, but we remain in the place we’ve lived for exactly three years now, according to the marked-up calendar that hangs in the kitchen. It’s close to the Strand and the slightly newer downtown that sits a block away so that I can take trips to get supplies (I always felt bad raiding people’s personal belongings); it’s also close to the university where Matthew used to work, where he has the keys to, and where he still goes sometimes. I don’t ask. Before the end, I drifted from place to place with a half a physics degree and a job-winning smile that also served to get me out of trouble when I needed it. I had a meaningless but content routine. For the academians, it was different. They had purpose.

Ours was a light blue—sky blue, I might have said, but the sky that day was too ashen to be an adequate blue—wider than it was tall, sans the whitewashed stilts that stood about twelve feet high. A wraparound porch, a couple of palm trees lording over a dead lawn, and unhindered ocean access that dug us further in debt than I’d like to admit. Off to the side, there’s a little greenhouse that Matthew has been working on for about six months now, using seeds he’d scoured from his university and that I’d found in a the same hardware store that gave us the PVC to make the bike trailer.

I stopped. Cut the engine again. I left the body, for now, using caution to take off my gloves, throwing them in a little pit we’d made near the stairs just for that purpose. We would bury them, eventually, because there wasn’t much else to do. I made a mental note to also sanitize the bike’s handlebars.

I stroked the bannister before ascending, a flake of paint coming off under my dirtied fingernail. I never used to let my nails get this bad. Sign of the times. 

The boards of the deck creaked beneath my feet, the wind up here pulling at my hair again, which is tied back this time. I can smell the salt off the waves; it isn’t a crystalline and clear ocean, like the last time I was in Costa Rica, when I’d go out every morning for a week to greet a manta ray with a ten-foot wingspan, always trying to touch it before it glided away. The waves here turn a dirty brown in the summer and the rays are about the size of car tires, but it is home. 

Inside, candles burned around the kitchen and living room. We had a generator, but preferred to preserve the energy. Besides, feeling and softness smouldered with the candles, bringing the home an inch closer to our gratuitously unswollen hearts. Unswollen, for time being. Tapes of flies hung over the entryway as I slipped off my shoes. There were thin patches of sand all over the tiles, a hazard of living on the beach and not having a working broom.

“Amor.” I hesitated to speak at first, because even the gentlest words can sever calm. 

Matthew’s back was turned as he hovered over something on the island in the kitchen. Even in the low light, I noticed that he’d given himself another choppy haircut, the silvery hair behind his ears sticking up at odd angles. I cross to the kitchen and take him into a warm embrace, though he still doesn’t turn.

I touched an awry tuft of hair. “I could have done that.”

“You would have taken weeks.” 

“Quality demands time. I’ll fix it.”

The humidity left its mark on his gleaming arms, and I could feel it on my hands, too. Air conditioning was something we used sparingly for the summers. Low-wattage fans were usually enough, as they tended to be gentler on the generators. He had something in his hands, but he shifted away to impede my view. 

“Ambros.” I let go as Matthew turned, but I didn’t step back. “Have you been in the garden today?” He always referred to the greenhouse as _the garden_ , preferring the connotation that the word garden carried. It was a place of life and light, though the garden was never what entered my mind when I thought of those words—especially when I found myself falling into his crystalline gaze, like when he took my fingers and cupped my hands around a thornless white rose, its petals blushed pink.

He nodded to the calendar that hung next to the old refrigerator that acted as a secure cabinet. It was better to keep out the flies. 

“It’s beautiful,” I said. I picked a petal off the edge and pressed it against his cheek with my thumb, laughing. “And look, it matches. In color and beauty.”

“You’re too kind.” Smiling regardless, he brushed it off. With a pang, I remembered what I’d come home for.

Over Matthew’s shoulder and through the slightly-open window, a few seagulls screeched batting their wings against the wind. One by one, they disappeared into the gloom. I couldn’t see the sunset, but I knew that the darkness would soon press around us like a closing book.  
The day was not the best for burning, but I didn’t want the flies to get at the body, although they likely already had. “I...I found another.”

Matthew’s lips twitched, trying not to kill the smile. “Oh. Okay. I have some gas in the cupboard. I’ll bring it. Be sure to wear gloves.”

“Yes, of course.” I set the rose in the vase in the center of the table and moved to leave, but turned to give Matthew a reassuring kiss on the cheek. He was still standing by the island when I left, eyes glassy. He always took it to heart more than I. Or maybe I was too wanton with my own. 

I put on a new pair of gloves that I’d retrieved from the kitchen and dragged the body to the part on the beach where the dry sand met the damp. I set the body just before this divide, to allow it to burn. A strand of hair clung to my face and I almost brushed it away; my hand dropped to my side when I realized that it may be carrying plague. 

The house is a dark silhouette, Matthew a smell cell that breaks from it, emerging from the fog with a bright red canister of gasoline and a few matches. 

He poured the gasoline over the body. It was sparing, just enough to keep the fire alive long enough to devour its prey. The first match ignited on the first try, dancing around in the breeze so that he had to turn his body against the wind. Instead of dropping the match, he slowly crouched, fire in hand still, and set the match atop the body so that it would catch without question. 

The sun set, a hazy white circle against the marine horizon. We only stood long enough to reassure ourselves that the body would burn completely, before retreating back to the house, where Matthew wordlessly retired to the bedroom, blowing out the candles in his wake. 

I was left with a single candle in the center of the kitchen table, twirling the rose absently in my fingers as I listened to the ocean shuffle over itself as the waves washed in and out.

In and out. 

Sometimes I couldn’t believe the fact that the two of us were the only ones left on the island; sometimes I wondered about mainland, once cable and internet went out for most of us. Two of two thousand. One thousand, nine hundred, and ninety-eight hearts that had swollen past capacity, that had caused their users to drop like the black flies who’d been the first to vomit spread pestilence across borders and oceans and—us. Us: what the flies started, we finished. After two years, they were no longer needed. It was in our snot and sweat and urine and blood. It was in the pulses that stopped and the cities that died and the mounds of bodies that piled atop them.

_In and out._

I rose. My breath the killing blow to a dying candle, I was left in the hazy light of a fog-enshrouded waxing moon. The fire outside had died, the ashes scattered by now. The white French doors that separated the bedroom from the kitchen and living room glowed, ghastly. They stood, crumpled ajar. 

_In and out._

I could still hear the waves; the wide window above our bed, too, was fully open. Here, the light was stronger; pillows and sheets found themselves in a halo of white roses around Matthew, who seemed to have his own iridescence apart from the moonlight. I fell in beside him, trying not to make a sound, but it didn’t matter; his eyes were open, glazed. In his ear I whispered a song of reassurances. The sheets crinkle as he shifts his shoulders and cranes his neck so that he can kiss me.

_In._

The sea beat in time with our entwined heart.

_Out._


	2. day two. matthew. sanctity.

I used to read Ambrosio’s journals. 

He knew. Expected it.

They always told me surprisingly little, and I don’t think it’s because I knew him well—I wanted to . He could write and write, tell little stories, but he wouldn’t say much. Sometimes, he’d scribble cute little poems for me in the margins. He stopped journaling a while ago, around the same time he substituted morning smokes for morning surfs. He almost lit his hair on fire doing that. 

“I didn’t save you for that,” I’d said.

Ambrosio’s lips had quirked up, the beginnings of a smile playing across his face. “What makes you think you saved me?”

I thought about that when I woke up this morning, rising before the sun. Thought about the ways he would quiet my mind, make me feel new. My skin itched where his had touched it. He couldn’t have left a more obvious mark if he’d been covered in paint. Despite the humidity, I felt a chill without him next to me. My heart felt heavy, but I could never explain to him why.

Shortly after waking, I searched the cabinets for something to eat, wincing when they banged against one another or when my footsteps landed too heavily on the tile. But Ambrosio remained asleep. I went through can after can, settled on some canned peaches. I thought about the coming spring, about how I’d have to pollinate the plants in the garden with little swabs to make sure we didn’t have to always live off canned food. I didn’t want canned food for dinner, though.

A breeze invited itself in through the still-open window over the table. The fog hadn’t lifted overnight, but I could see a good distance out to sea. Despite the slight breeze, the ocean was calmer than it had been in a while. It definitely didn’t look like a red flag kind of day.

On a whim, I grabbed the fishing pole and the tackle box from beside the door and set out just as the sun rose. Ambrosio would be getting up soon. We were early risers, the two of us. 

I walked out onto the beach, not pausing to take in the sunrise until my sandals reached wet sand. And what a sunrise it was. I silently prayed for Ambrosio to wake before it was over. 

The air around me blushed pink like the edges of the rose I’d given Ambrosio. In the center of it all, the sun a was small disc that hovered over dull blue clouds, clouds that were blurry and indistinct, merging with the pink above and around. It felt surreal.

After a deep inhale of the brackish, humid air, I went back to the house to find the battered motorized dinghy and gave it a dose of the same gas I’d poured over the body less than twenty-four hours ago. It didn’t feel like that. But time got all crunched when you didn’t need to measure it anymore. 

A wooden rosary necklace sat in the bottom of the boat, left by the boat’s previous owner. It was stained dark with water. I held it in my palm and pull my hand back, ready to throw it into the sea, but it felt odd, like throwing away a photograph of a smiling stranger. I slipped it on over my neck instead. I’ll do something with it later. 

After loading the fishing pole and the tackle box into the dinghy, I took the frayed rope and dragged the boat out to the beach, startling a cluster of sandpipers. I always thought they were funny birds, like mottled brown-gray seagulls on stilts. The birds eyed me as they strutted off, but they didn’t care to fly quite yet. 

My feet sunk into the soft sand as I stepped into the water, little white flecks of shell crunching under my shoes, foam tickling at my ankles. When the water reached my knees, I pushed off and hopped into the boat, which rocked back and forth even as it bobbed up and down in the waves. I had to catch the fishing pole before it flew from the dinghy. The lure acted as a pendulum, swinging around and almost causing the hook to lodge itself in my face. 

The motor whirred to life and brought me out a little further— 

“Matthew!” I heard a shout echo from the shore and stalled the motor. 

“Amor!” I had to squint to see Ambrosio through the fog. He jumped up and down, arms above his head. “Wait for me!”

I smiled to myself and turned off the motor, listening to the waves lap against the side of the boat. Ambrosio rushed into the water, diving forward when he could no longer run. I lost him in a swell and held my breath, but he reappeared seconds later, lean arms heaving against the current. Though he never told me and he never wrote where he was from, I’d always known him as a child of the sea. I remembered catching him last time he was adrift, at a seafood restaurant that overlooked the bay on the northwestern end of the island. The water that day had been a deep shade of blue, interrupted by the occasional long low barge or cruise ship or yacht. I’d seen four or five dolphins through the window behind the bar before a man with tawny skin and a face like a renaissance statue—bad comparison; he’d had a more crooked-nosed and pockmarked and hard-jawed uneven beauty to him, something more human than art—settled next to me, making me acutely aware of my horrible sunburn and shitty reading glasses that I’d fixed with staples. I’d tried not to stare, but he’d caught me. 

“Do you happen to know whose bike is out in front?” Ambrosio had asked. 

“Which one?”

“The black one that sparkles when the light hits it right. With the leather on the handlebars.”

In the background, the TV was running off on some tangent over presidential elections and a strange new pathogen that caused its victims to drop dead. I’d already known all about that.

“Mine,” I’d said, quietly. The words had tumbled out of my mouth after that. “I-I can give you a ride. If—if that’s not weird—I won’t make it weird, I promise, I—” Damn it, Matt, I’d thought, you’re going to get hit again if you keep this up. 

“I’d love to,” He’d replied. I was floored.

Something tugged at the side of the dinghy and the memory melted away, leaving a bittersweet taste in my mouth. Ambrosio’s head broke the surface of the water shortly after, his dark hair sticking to his face in little rippled locks. 

“What are you doing?” I asked. 

“Went for a swim. Come closer.”

“Why?” I laughed, leaning closer, expecting something sweet. The rosary, forgotten until then, dangled between us.

“What’s this?” he asks, hanging onto the boat with one hand and taking the cross at the end of the rosary in the other. “You said you weren’t Catholic when I asked.”

“I’m not. I just...found it.” 

“Is that lucky or unlucky?”

“You tell me.”

“Okay.” And before I knew what was happening, he pulled the necklace forward until I was leaning precariously over the edge. Then he grabbed my wrist and tugged me until I fell forward, almost flipping over myself into the waves.

I surfaced, coughing. Ambrosio guided my hand to the side of the boat and I wiped my eyes against my shoulder, trying to clear the burning water from them. It didn’t work.

“I didn’t know you swam!” he exclaimed. I gave him a playful shove and he just laughed. I laughed, too; in spite of my best efforts, we were getting canned something for dinner.

We treaded water, riding the waves with the boat, the swells rising and sinking around us. Seagulls milled in circles above, wings twitching in the updrafts. I felt the current tugging beneath us, beckoning us back to shore. Not yet, I thought, kicking my legs as if it made a difference. We had time; these days, we had all the time we needed. 

We watched the gulls, waiting for the next waves to carry us closer to shore. The rosary felt heavier than it should have against my chest. “Ambrosio?” I had to call his name so that it would drown out the water in my ears. 

“Yes?” His hair was still slathered all over his face. I reached over and brushed it away, tucking it behind his ear.

“Can all souls be saved?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“The kind you ask when you’ve got all the time in the world to ask questions.”

He considered this. “Are you worried? All of the sudden?” 

I said nothing. Another swell came and went and left us in another trough, blocking our view of the land. It felt like we were alone in the middle of the ocean. Ambrosio took the cross in his hand and slipped the beaded necklace over my neck, freeing me. 

“Does it matter?” Palm flat, fingers splayed, he dropped the rosary. We watched it sink through the dusky water until the darkness swallowed it. “The Rapture has come and gone.”

He always talked like that. _The Rapture, the plague, the pestilence._ Not _the end of life as we knew it,_ not _a pandemic._ As if making something divine, as if giving it a reason made it hurt any less. I used to talk to myself like that, say it was all for more. But Ambrosio couldn’t have known about that; he was probably just describing things as he always did, making them more beautiful than they actually were. 

A gull cried overhead, impatient. 

But Ambrosio wasn’t waiting for an answer, didn’t expect one. 

And my _“I think—”_ was drowned out in the next swell, the water easing over my shoulders and around my neck.

_For me, yes._


	3. day three. ambrosio. acuity.

My limbs still ached from a day of battling against the current, but every moment had been worth it. Increasingly, Matthew’s thoughts had been turning dark at every turn, and I had hoped that dropping the rosary would release a weight of sorts, like an old hot air balloon dropping ballast.

Hot air balloons: I dearly missed them. Living after almost everyone else has passed was tolerable most days, and I eased into the lifestyle a little more each day, but small things would bring pangs, like loved ones who died long ago but who still drifted through my thoughts from time to time, leaving ghosts in their wakes. 

I missed the barges that used to drift by east end; I missed the Strand on a busy day, when the haze was nonexistent and vacationers and tourists walked side-by-side, enjoying the sun on their faces and the unbounded feeling that would settle in the chest on a lovely summer day like a silk cloth. It had been years since my last milkshake; my last carefree stroll; since the last time I bought a little trinket—a postcard for a friend I’d met in those two years in college or a shiny plastic crab with the island’s name on it to sit on the windowsill next to a mound of dead black flies—and the last time I felt the soft paper money in my fingers, back when it stood for something in my mind. I felt the weight of all that had been lost.

_Can all souls be saved?_

_What an odd question,_ I’d thought. He’d ask these things, sometimes, but it had been awhile since the last burst. The bridges broken, this was almost certainly the last body to be found, and then perhaps the questions would taper off forever. _Survivor’s guilt, _I’d said once. But he’d shaken his head, like he always did when I smoked.__

_  
_We watched the next blushing sunrise together, the smoke floating up from the cigarette between my fingers to form a crescent around the sun. With my other hand, I tapped the clear yellow lighter against the deck._  
_

__“It’s a shame that more people can’t see this,” I said._ _

__Matthew leaned into me, saying nothing, but I felt his breath catch._ _

__“What is it, love?” The air around us was pastel-hued, the fog as thick as it was for the last burning._ _

__“Nothing. I was thinking about the desalinators. We need another one, a backup in case the one we have quits working. Or for spare parts…” The were fluff. He knew it. I knew it. There was something else that lingered, but he either didn’t have the words or the heart to tell me. “I’ll go back to the university today or tomorrow, to see if I can find another.”_ _

__“Yes,” I said. “We have time.”_ _

__“Of course.”_ _

__The sun rose and the air grudgingly shifted back to its usual soft grey blue. A few hours later, after we both ate and talked about a book I’d scavenged and read from the old bookstore—a rather cinematically-written apocalypse story about a world on fire and its doomed inhabitants—Matthew finally departed for the university, briefly cleaning the bike with the 90% isopropyl alcohol that I’d found in the abandoned pharmacy so that the plague from the corpse would not spread to him. I had to remind him to do this, and in response he smiled and nodded sheepishly, as if he’d already forgotten about the illness that had killed everyone we’d known. It was possible to walk to the university, but Matthew always said that he felt an almost visceral freedom when he was on that bike; it worked as a resting place for his mind._ _

__I felt a similar feeling around noon, when the sun was invisible through the kitchen window, Matthew had been gone for a few hours, and I had started and stopped a painting with the few acrylics that we had left. It wasn’t a feeling of freedom; something ate at the back of my mind, and, try as I might, it slipped through my fingers when I tried to identify it. I held the brush between my fingers as I would a cigarette, tapping it against the table. I could make pigments from the plants in the garden for the future, I mused, but my creativity would have to return first._ _

__Over a dully-flickering candle—the only one in the room, as the light from outside was enough for now—I watched a pelican drop into the ocean to sit, duck-like, under a clump of hovering gulls. It must have been a school of fish._ _

___Fish and birds, _I thought. The plague—the pandemic, rather—had been one of the deadliest illnesses known to man, but it hadn’t been able to transfer to or from any other species. When Matthew had told me this, I’d asked why this was.__ _ _

____“I-I don’t know,” he’d admitted. Maybe he found it odd to talk science with me; I was never sure whether he believed my story about having half of a physics degree. It was false; I had a little more than half of a degree, but what was I to do with it when I was nowhere near dexterous to apply those physical principles that I’d half-learned? It’s not like I actually graduated; I was also loathe to consider myself an academician, and was glad when I left the cutthroat atmosphere to drift._ _ _ _

____“Immunity is—theoretically—possible, though,” Matthew had added this in a small voice, as if he hadn’t been sure that I should know; as if it were some confidential information that he shared with me. “I could find—”_ _ _ _

____I’d reached for his hand. “Don’t bother. You’ll spend the rest of your life searching, and it will be time wasted. Time that could have been enjoyed.” He hadn’t looked at me._ _ _ _

____“And if, by some...natural cause, you and I were found to be immune, as some people are inevitably?”_ _ _ _

____“I don’t know how likely that is. But I wouldn’t question it.”_ _ _ _

____This seemed to satisfy him, and the subject of the plague was rarely—if ever—resurrected after that conversation, sans little sprinkled bits about his work at the university, back when it was a functioning institution. When we had conversations over the microwave dinners that he actually seemed to enjoy, when the sickness was still scattered. Although it found its way to the island early on (hence the burning of the highways that led in and out; the people here thought that they could stop new instances by halting travel into the island) we still thought it as something controllable and remote. I had, at least._ _ _ _

____“Biology,” he’d replied, narrowing a million possible subjects down to a thousand. He would say no more on the matter._ _ _ _

____It always seemed like neither of us cared too much for our respective pasts. The present was always enough, the conversations and explorations of the various things that interested us both at a given moment, things that weren’t always semi-comedic books about an apocalypse that never came, an overly-dramatized end when the real end was more of a slow fade, a light jog into a blanket of mist._ _ _ _

______Finally I stood from the table, putting the brush down and holding the painted cardboard in both hands. I then gathered up some canned food and took a bottle out of our water bottle armada and placed them in a worn messenger bag that I had secured from the thrift store where Matthew and I would laugh over the overabundance of pastel hibiscus and palm shirts, and then I’d buy one for him, knowing that he secretly liked the patterns, always a kitsch biker at heart.  


_—_

__  
The interior of the university was hollow, life’s fingerprints marring the now-empty halls in the form of flyers advertising upcoming events; pencils, pens and other supplies scattered around the floor; white papers, now yellow, that found themselves knotted in corners and sullenly gasping on cold white tiles, stirred by winds that broke through likewise-broken windows.

____I walked down the halls, careful not to touch anything, until I found a single room that brimmed with light._ _ _ _

____Matthew jumped as I shouldered open the door. “Ambros—what are you doing here?”_ _ _ _

____We were in a little lab, power supplied to us by a generator that hummed in the corner of the room._ _ _ _

____“I brought lunch. I thought we could have a picnic?” It sounded stupid, but he smiled and nodded._ _ _ _

____“A picnic,” he repeated, setting down his cracked glasses. “On the beach?”_ _ _ _

____“Unless you want to in _here_.” I gestured around. The room was small and windowless. Syringes littered the table in front of Matthew, alongside an unmarked cardboard box. “What are you doing here, anyway?”_ _ _ _

____“I—I just found this place, a-actually. I hooked up the generator to get a better look, because there wasn’t any sun coming in from the hall.” He hesitated, but added, “I… _found_ something, too.”_ _ _ _

____I set the bag on the floor and moved closer as he opened the box._ _ _ _

____I recoiled as soon as I saw its contents. “Flies?”_ _ _ _

____“I think—well, I—they might be _the ones._ ” _ _ _ _

____“What are you talking about? The _ones_?”_ _ _ _

____The words tumbled from his mouth like snow in an avalanche. “The ones—the first—Ambrosio—Ambros, do you remember how high the disease instance here, in this region, was, as opposed to the rest of the nation, the rest of the world? How we—they—were so efficient to quarantine here, as if they knew what would happen?”_ _ _ _

____I stepped back. “I don’t understand.”_ _ _ _

____“Y-you do. I think you do.”_ _ _ _

____“The pandemic, it—it originated here. Just pack the tourists’ vehicles, the homes here, everything, with flies of the first gen—er, the parent gen—and they brought it to the rest of the country. Flies, they...they breed so quickly, and, uh…”_ _ _ _

____“Why?”_ _ _ _

_“Why?”_

“You are saying that the plague was…” I searched for a word, but he had it ready. 

____“Engineered?”_ _ _ _

____“Yes. Why would anyone do that?”_ _ _ _

____“I—” His eyes lit up, but the light quickly died. I’d never seen anything like it. He set the box of dead flies down and my breath caught; he wore no gloves. “I don’t…know.”_ _ _ _

____My eyes narrowed, but I hoped he didn’t notice. “Let’s leave this place, then. It’s no good.”_ _ _ _

____“All...all right. Let me cut the generator.”_ _ _ _

____We walked home, but my hand in his was cold. My heart froze and thawed and froze again, pieces of it flaking off and landing as ashes in the hollows of the footprints that I left in the sand._ _ _ _

____The old steel wheels on the generator were rusted, and the rust had bled and fallen onto the tires and the tiles beneath._ _ _ _

____It had been there for some time._ _ _ _


	4. day four. matthew. fidelity.

“Ambros, you’re holding back.” He hadn’t spoken since giving me the painting this morning, taking it from the same bag he’d brought lunch in yesterday. It seemed like he’d planned on giving it to me yesterday, but had gotten sidetracked. 

He’d gone surfing this morning, a black figure in the blue. Medium blue fog, light blue sky, dark blue waves, tinted brown. First time in almost eight months, or something like that. The calendar was in the kitchen was a few years old, after all. To be honest, I’d even lost track of the days of the week. 

The Gulf waters didn’t tend to get _that_ cold, but could chill up in the winter. So it hadn’t come as a surprise to see Ambrosio trudging out of the water a couple hours after sunrise clad in that sleek black wetsuit that I thought he’d buried somewhere, I hadn’t seen it in so long. Rivulets of seafoam glided around his knees as he slogged forward, against the current, blue surfboard in arm. When he’d reached the beach, he lodged the board in the dry sand and paused to wring out his shoulder-length hair, hair that was permanently tangled these days (“Run a comb through it,” I’d suggested one day; “That isn’t how wavy hair tends to work,” he’d replied). 

From the deck, I’d stared. But if he’d felt my gaze—and he usually did, somehow—he hadn’t shown it. He’d leaned against the board for a few minutes, watching the waves, every faucet and angle of his lithe form accentuated by that damn wetsuit, looking all the more angelic in that dim morning light. When he’d finally come back to the house to rinse off with a small ration of desalinated water, he’d shouldered past me, nodding and shaking his head to himself, not inviting me into the conversation. 

The sky had not turned flush this morning, instead moving from the deep midnight blue to a powdery cobalt to the dead steel of late morning. 

And in that late morning, I sat across from Ambrosio and said his name again, his full name. “Ambrosio.”

He didn’t look at me until I leaned forward and rested my hand on his. 

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

“W…” His voice hoarse, he cleared his throat and started again. “What?”

I gestured to the painting, what was once a random piece of cardboard. He’d painted an idealized portrait of me for me, startlingly detailed around the eyes and dissolving to vague brushstrokes around the hair and chin. The blue of the eyes—my eyes, in Ambrosio’s mindspace—was more vibrant than it really was, and I wondered how he’d managed that with just a spot of blue paint left, almost all spent back when he used to sit out and paint the ocean. 

The look in the portrait’s eyes was softer than I’d ever seen in the mirror.

Ambrosio nodded, drew in a breath. No candles were lit, leaving the room comfortable on any other day but somber on that particular morning. 

“Ambros.” I repeated, kneading my thumb in his palm. He gently withdrew his hand, leaving me stretched over the table, reaching for nothing. 

“I...don’t think that you have been...honest with me,” Ambrosio finally replied, choosing his words carefully. I felt him drifting as he stared at the window. I hated that. He was a child of the ocean, yes, and his mind was a sea. 

“Honest? Is this…about yesterday?” 

He looked me in the eye, then, rubbing his hand as if he’d been injured. “You lied.”

“Lied?” I repeated.

“The generator. It had been there for a while.”

I was incredulous. “The generator? _That’s_ what this is about?”

“You said….that you found the room. But the generator was rusted all over the floor.”

“Ambros. You’re smarter than that. The generator was there, in the room, when I found it.”

He shook his head. “But the flies. How—where did you find them? I always thought that you went back to the old school for some nostalgic reason, but when I saw you, you were—”

“Cleaning. I was cleaning. I found the flies in an old freezer unit and I was going to burn the box. If—if the pandemic really originated there, then don’t you think that it would still have some contaminants left? Contaminants that could leach into the water or get loose? I was cleaning, Ambros.”

His voice was soft. “I don’t believe you.”

“Then what would make you believe me?”

“The way you acted. It was…”

“You had never come to visit me before. And—and wouldn’t you be surprised if you found proof of your greatest nightmare in a freezer of your old workplace? I found some of the papers in a drawer in the office of one of the researchers, a tenured professor. It confirmed everything I’d thought.” 

Ambrosio slowly nodded, brow still furrowed. Outside, a gull cried. I could see the sandpipers all lined up on the beach again, their needle-like beaks bobbing up and down as they hunted for food.

“I’m done there, if that makes you happy,” I added.

“Done?”

“Finished. I was going to burn the box of flies. That’s all.” 

There was another pause. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“About what?”

“All of it. I wondered, too. Matthew, I’m a poet. A romantic fool, fine. But I’m not an idiot. What did you used to do at the university? And what motivation could anyone possibly have to create such a—a thing,” he finished, uncharacteristically ineloquent.

“Research. I was—”

“A biologist.” 

I hesitated, and he caught it. But the truth is, I didn’t know what he was looking for. “As for the motive…it wasn’t war, and it wasn’t an accident.”

“But what?”

“Does it matter,” I said, echoing his words, taking his hand again, “when the Rapture has already come and gone?”

He let out a breath as if his head just broke the surface of some dark pool. “It’s done, isn’t it?”

“There’s no more. It’s done. We can forget this. I’ll burn the flies, and we’ll live as if the end never came.” I released his hand and stood, walking into the kitchen and retrieving a flask of wine that we kept for special occasions. I set it in front of Ambrosio, a peace offering. After a moment’s hesitation, he took it, draining the flask in one swig. 

When I took his hand again, it was warm. 

_Can all souls be saved?_

The vodka went next. It was flavorless and odorless, so that when we kissed, all that I could taste was the velvety charcoal of the wine, which was forever gone from our world as we knew it. French doors out the corners of my eyes, the ocean singing through the window above our heads, no wonder Ambrosio was so obsessed with it— 

He pulled back. “Matthew—”

“Ambrosio.” I shifted to fill the space he left, stroking his cheek. Smooth, as it always had been. I’d always felt like an old sailor in comparison. “We have all the time in the world. Remember?”

His dark eyes were caught in some depth that I couldn’t reach, but he relaxed again, allowing me to draw him forward. 

_Ambrosio, tell me, can all souls be saved?_


	5. day five. ambrosio. felicity.

Morning broke on the sixth day since the last burning, and I remained unconvinced of Matthew’s innocence. I don’t know what made me disbelieve him so, and it tore at me, a mortal Prometheus chained to the edge of place I called home, heart and soul picked over by the black flies that carried pestilence on their breaths. 

I woke before the breaking.

I did not disturb Matthew when I rose. He had realized that the one thing as potent as alcohol was passion, and I had taken the bait in my hand and had welcomed that drunken synergy with appalling ease. I’d thought of salvation; I’d thought of it as a simple thing, with a haze as thick in my mind as the fog that hung over my beloved waves.

I lit a single candle and carried it with me to the island in the kitchen, where a bottle of vodka lay on its side, dripping its life away. A light on the horizon hinted at the coming dawn. For the first time in years, I felt the morning and the sleeplessness of the prior night in fresh black hollows beneath my eyes. I went through bottle after bottle of water, but the dark would not leave. 

When a light through the kitchen window became a line on the haze, I left the candle burning atop my two-day-old painting, just between the subject’s clear blue eyes. It was only after this that I resolved to rejoin the breathing version of said subject, settling myself amidst the rumpled sheets like a ship in a storm. The cotton felt harsh against my bare flesh.

Matthew stirred.

I felt like I was hurtling toward something cataclysmic yet inevitable, a comet caught in the pull of a far greater celestial body. _Inevitable,_ I wondered, _really and truly?_ I could stop, theoretically. I could return to the state I’d been in less than five days ago, happy, blissful, even, and ultimately oblivious. 

No. The current had me, and I would not fight it. I’d always thought of the bridgeburners of the early plague days as manic and irrational, their panic leading to the destruction of our only outlet to the rest of the world—a world that may or may have existed by the time I’d ridden the old black bike home with a corpse in the trailer—but I felt it, then—that need for action, as well as that driving curiosity that I was always told would be the death of me—as rays of sunlight finally cut through the haze outside our window. 

The air smelled staunchly of sweat and ocean and vaguely of dry wine. I rested my hand on Matthew’s shoulder, bracing against him to lean forward so that my lips almost touched his ear when I spoke.

“You’re holding back, Matthew.” My voice was low but devoid of malice. His eyes remained closed, but a shift in his breathing told me that he was awake. 

He didn’t shift or turn; he didn’t even open his eyes. “Forget this, Ambros.” 

“Is the truth so harsh?”

“No.”

“Then tell me. I saw you with the rosary. It ate at you.”

“It’s not what you think.”

“Then tell me,” I repeated. “Let’s mend this.”

“I don’t know that it will. I—I didn’t ask forgiveness for what I’ve done.” His eyes were open now, but slitted, twin lakes against rose white, an inversion of the morning’s sunrise. Still, he doesn’t look at me. “I...saved us. I saved you.”

“How?”

He sighted, and it took him a moment to dredge up the word. “Immunity.”

“There was a vaccine?”

“No. At least, not one that would’ve taken fewer than three years to make. By then...well, you saw. It was more of a battery of immunizations. Boosters…I gave them to myself, too.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“No.” He rolled his shoulder, shrugging my hand off of it. “No. It was in pill form, like the Typhoid boosters used to be. Several rounds, and you couldn’t taste…if you ground up the pills and mixed it into a cup of good ol’ Gulf sweet tea.”

I fell back, onto the bed, hope springing into my chest. “That’s all?”

“You know damn well it’s not.”

Of course. “Then _tell me._ ”

He didn’t speak. The waves roared in the background, the threat of rain pungent in the air, humidity swelling like a wave about to crash forward.

“You call it the pestilence. I liked the words you used to use when you wrote. The Rapture, you said. But look.” He tilted his chin up, gesturing toward the oceanfront, where gulls and other birds squabbled and screamed. “Does that look like the end?”

The sea batted against the shore, erratic, having lost its pulse. I watched it in silence, a silence so deep that I could hear our joint breathing—except, the unity had become unhinged. 

I didn’t need him to say it; he already had. He’d said it as soon as he’d said, I saved you. It felt like the time I’d gotten caught under the edge of a barrel wave, the type wave that broke in a hollow roll around me. Of course, I’d threaded through such waves before, but this time left me crashing against an outcropping of rocks, an experience that had left me with five stitches and the accompanying embarrassing story. 

_Immunity._ The rocks had—literally—appeared out of the blue. Black flies in a swirl of swells. 

You can’t immunize yourself against something that you don’t know exists.

Words failed me.

Matthew roll over, facing me. “It’s not. But you’re afraid to admit it.”

“People…died.”

“They would have died anyway. We were reaching the end. It was a mercy kill, love.”

“...no.” There was a question I wanted to ask, and I hated myself for it. Matthew saw it in my carefully averted eyes. _Love._ The word taunted me, haunted me, burrowed under my skin.

He echoed my thoughts: _“How?”_

I didn’t reply, not caring to admit my guilt.

“How?” he repeated. “Genetic engineering, that’s how. I lied about the paperwork, yes. I had free reign in the lab, passed the disease off as something I’d extracted from a dead fish. It can’t transfer between species, but they were dead before they realized it…the flies carried it; they were modified, too, so that they could transfer the virus to their offspring. Silly lab techs, letting the flies get at the the samples.” He smiled wanly, nostalgically. “It was beautiful.”

My voice was hoarse. “Why did you ask for forgiveness if you do not regret it?”

The smile collapsed in on itself, and I couldn’t read the storm that danced across his features like candlelight through a hazy corridor. “Sometimes I catch myself thinking that I should. I don’t. I won’t. Can all souls be saved? I asked you that, and it wasn’t for myself.” He rubbed his fingers together, deftly searching for beads that weren’t there. “Surely, some among the pure were.”

The sun disappeared in a sheet of rain over the ocean, a long cloud engulfing the horizon. My mind struggled to make sense of his words. “Why did you never tell me this?”

“I was afraid that you wouldn’t understand.” He looked up at me imploringly, a golden-haired child sitting the front pew during mass. “But you do. I see it in your eyes, you do. You do. It wasn’t the end. And you and I, we’ll be together and we very well may be among the last. I saved you, Ambros, because I knew that you, among everyone else, would understand.”

No, said the waves, agents of endless creation and destruction. _No, no, no…_

My head broke the surface. My lungs found air, fresh and crisp and new, the black rocks receding into the distance. Clarity engulfed me.

I settled back into the bed and I cupped his face in my hands. A brackish wind blew the first of the rain in through our window, spotting Matthew’s face and forming rivulets as the droplets joined the tears that had appeared just seconds before. 

“Yes,” I said, my forehead to his, the rain darkening the sheets around us. “I understand.”


	6. day six. matthew. audacity.

_Renaissance,_ I thought. Yesterday’s rain had brought a new smell to the air. Renaissance. That was the word that Ambrosio would use. And mine arrived at his hand. We walked along the shore, hand-in-hand, between a thicket of bright green palms and the dark water. His palm sweat, or maybe mine; he had always been better at handling the humidity than me.

_I understand._ I hated myself for doubting. In my mind’s eye, I saw us in the ocean again, felt the last bead of the rosary tugged free from my fingers. Watched as Ambrosio released it to the water below. Because he felt it, this peace. The world around us was at peace, and I had delivered it. 

Of course he’d understood. But I had been afraid.

We hardly spoke as we walked, as we burned the flies on the edge of a grotto. Ambrosio threw down a busily-patterned blanket that had once been a rich gold with inflections of blue and red and green.

“My grandmother gave this when I left,” he said. We sat on the blanket, leaning into one another, a can of oranges between us. “I never saw her again after that.”

“You’ve never told me that.”

“What?” A gust of wind looped through the shallow cave, clearing the hair from his eyes before I had a chance to do so.

“Your past.” 

He stared ahead for a few minutes. The storm had briefly cut through the fog, and now the sea looked limitless. Our island could have been the only island on a world of ocean.

Then he sighed, like he’d reached some sort of decision. “Their accents were musical when they spoke. Lilting, almost. I’ve never heard anything like it. It must’ve been the way the native languages merged with the Spanish…the rain forests were—were beautiful, almost mystic, but not primal…” He trailed off, lost again.

I touched his hand and his eyes snapped back into focus. I felt like I was engaged in a tug-of-war with his past, with those depths that he always retreated to. _I didn’t save you for this._ The only way to save someone who’s permanently astray is to guide them in another direction and hope for the best. And I did. 

And when we fell, we fell together, the cross disappearing into the abyss.


	7. day seven. ambrosio. crepuscularity.

My hands shook as I picked the petals off the rose, one by one, taking care not to tear them. I went down to the greenhouse—the garden—to fetch another rose, and came back with two, along with two black cables that I slung over my shoulder. I could see Matthew’s boat receding into the waves; he’d be gone a few hours yet. I waved, but did not run to him, thankful that he couldn’t see my expression.

I didn’t warn him away from the water, though I should have; the fog had come back wit a vengeance, drowning light and sound.

Shortly before I anticipated his return, I went through the house and lit every candle. I went to the the en suite and filled the bathtub with cool water from the ocean, diluting it with some of our remaining desalinated water. I took a little more seawater than necessary to bathe; a bottle full, to be precise. 

Leaving the door to the en suite open behind me, I eased into the water and scattered the petals around me. They stood out against the iridescent russet tiles that coated the room, lit up via the candles and wide window that hung over the tub, which was large enough for me to comfortably lay back, closing my eyes. I took the other rose and set it on the ledge near my arm, careful not to drop it into the water. I knew that I would emerge from the water with salt coating my skin, but I didn’t mind. 

The front door creaked open. The air was sickeningly sweet with the song of candlefire. 

“Amor,” I called.

His footsteps were muffled by the carpeting, carpeting that ended where the tiles began. I didn’t need to open my eyes; I felt him standing in the doorway. My hand rested on a switch that he couldn’t see. 

“Ambros,” he said, my name hardly more than a sigh. 

The tiles gleamed brighter than they should have.

Concrete pillars crumbled into the sea.

“Amor,” I said again, eyes open, bringing the rose on the ledge beside me to my nose. My voice did not break, as I’d anticipated; my pulse did not race. “Join me.”

With bare feet, he stepped onto the slick tile. I hesitated. In his eyes, I saw a fogless sky, but the softness that I once knew was gone. Or perhaps it had never been there; there was a distinct possibility that I had crafted this light and love by myself, that he was—had always been—unfathomable as the sky before the end. 

He leaned over to kiss me, but I stopped him. “How many are left?” I asked, careful to keep my voice low, to not speak in an accusatory way. 

“Left?”

“After your…mercy.”

He narrowed his eyes, pensive. “I don’t know. Thousands, still?”

“I have one more question.”

I reached up and pulled him into one last kiss, one that felt as timeless as this little eternity we’d shared. The ashes of the bridges fell into the sea; immortality was cut short as my thumb twitched half an inch, as I nudged him back an equal distance, because Newton had told me all those years ago that every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

“Can all souls be saved?”

I soon discovered for myself that it one hundred milliamperes is enough to stop a human heart.

The water hissed. The current found Matthew’s veins before he had a chance to realize what I’d done. 

No. He realized it; I saw it in the pain that cut through his crystal eyes, in the way that his lips parted, my taste still written across them. He realized it, but he had no time to react before a convulsion screamed through his heart and he made one final and desperate attempt to reach me, fingers splayed and twitching. I heard my name in his trembling jaw, but it never left his mouth.

Does that look like the end?

I held the rose to my face, my tears running through the petals like rain. I dropped it into the water in front of me and braced my arms against the ledges of the bathtub. But before I was able to join Matthew where he lay on the tiles, the shorted sparks blew in one last flurry of gold, the generator having taken too much.

The generator cooled. I was left in silence.

Near silence; I could hear the ocean resounding from the open window in the other room, calmed again to a rhythmic pulse. Matthew’s did not answer it. 

I edged out of the water and slid to the floor, where Matthew lay on his side, staring at something that I could not see. I settled across from him as I had every night for three years and a week. Understanding had not yet taken me as I gingerly closed his eyes. 

He felt too light as I lifted him into the bathtub, as the petals in the water stirred and arranged themselves around his lifeless form. I tore up the remaining rose let the fresh petals rain over him, placing two over his eyes. 

Wan sunlight streamed in through the window, scattered by the fog and candlelight.  
I’ll join you in time. I don’t remember whether I said it or thought it. It didn’t matter.

That was how I left him.  


The island became a stranger to me as I ran along the twilight beach, the waves rushing forward to cover my tracks. A beacon of light burned behind me, a house that was once a bright blue. The dark and the haze rushed in to make it disappear. 

A child of the sea, I caught myself adrift.


End file.
